My wife's uncle has spent fifty years watching birds. He's 74. A retired ornithologist. He has studied one bird his whole life: the red-crowned crane of Japan. Last March, he flew to Nebraska to see the sandhill cranes. Every spring, hundreds of thousands of them stop on the Platte River. He stayed six weeks in a small town nearby. He came home with two field notebooks. The first one is about cranes. The second one is about you. He's a scientist. So he did what scientists do. He observed. He took notes. He gave everything a Latin name. The title on the cover: "FIELD GUIDE TO THE NORTH AMERICAN HUMAN (Midwestern subspecies)" He let me copy some entries. THE DRIVEWAY DAD Pater drivewayensis Habitat: Driveways. Garages. The edge of the lawn at dusk. Identification: Shorts in 40-degree weather. Coffee mug that says #1# GRANDPA. Has never been observed sitting down in his own yard. Call: "Eh, she'll run." Behavior: If your car will not start, he will appear. He does not know you. This is not relevant to him. THE CHURCH LADY Casserola benevolens Identification: Travels in flocks of four. Always carrying a pan covered in foil. Call: "Oh, honey." Behavior: Arrives within three hours of any bad news. Nobody has ever seen her called. She can detect a funeral two counties away. THE DINER WAITRESS Refilla perpetua Habitat: Diners near the highway. Open since 5 a.m. Possibly since 1962. Call: "You want a warm-up, sweetie?" Behavior: Refills coffee before it is empty. Knows every regular's name, children, and dog. Field note: Called me "sweetie" on the first day. I am 74 years old and a doctor of science. I did not object. THE TRUCK GUY Ferens couchus Identification: Owns a pickup truck. Therefore owns your Saturday. Call: "You need help moving?" (Asked before you have mentioned moving.) Behavior: Will carry your couch up three flights of stairs. Will not accept money. Will accept pizza. Will accept exactly one beer. THE COFFEE CLUB Senex consilium Habitat: Corner booth of the fast-food restaurant. 6 a.m. The same five men since 1987. Behavior: Solves every problem in the nation by 7:15 a.m. Implements none of them. Field note: On my first morning, they asked where I was from. I said Japan. A man in a seed cap said, "Well, welcome." Then he paid for my coffee. By the third morning, they had voted. I was "alright." By the fifth morning, one of them was driving me to the river at 5 a.m. to see the cranes. He has lived next to the cranes for seventy years. He said he came for the cranes. He did not watch the cranes. He watched me watching them. THE BLEACHER MOM Mater bandaidus Habitat: Bleachers. A folding chair with a cupholder. Call: "GOOD EYE!" (Shouted at children who have done nothing.) Behavior: Carries snacks for her child and for eleven children who are not hers. Has a bandage at all times, from a source no scientist has located. THE TEENAGE BAGGER Juvenis sleetfortis Identification: Sixteen. Name tag. Voice still deciding. Call: "Need help out to your car, ma'am?" Behavior: Will carry an old woman's groceries across a parking lot in sleet, then say "No problem!" as if it were no problem. Field note: It was a problem. It was sleet. THE SNOWBLOWER NEIGHBOR Vicinus invisibilis Behavior: Clears his own driveway. Then yours. Then the widow's at the end of the street. Then disappears. Field note: Very common. Never photographed in the act. I waited at the window for three mornings. I only ever found the tracks. FLOCKING BEHAVIOR Observed on a Friday night at a high school football field. Two thousand individuals. When the music began, every one of them stood up. The men removed their hats. A four-year-old in the front row saw his father do it, and removed his hat too. Then he put his hand over his heart, on the wrong side. Nobody corrected him. Field note: I have watched ten thousand cranes rise from a river at once. I have never seen anything move together like that. On the last page of the notebook, he stopped writing like a scientist. He wrote about his cranes. In the 1920s, everyone in Japan believed the red-crowned crane was extinct. Then a few were found in a marsh in Hokkaido. About twenty birds. That was all that was left. They were not saved by scientists. He says that himself. They were saved by farmers. Ordinary people, in the hardest winters, who walked out into the snow and scattered corn for birds that did not belong to them. Year after year. Nobody asked them to. Today there are more than a thousand. Then, in Nebraska, he watched hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes rest on their long journey north. Eating the corn left behind in farmers' fields. He watched the people too. Stopping. Carrying. Shoveling. Feeding. Standing up together in the cold. At the bottom of the very last page, he filled in the box every field guide has for every species. CONSERVATION STATUS: According to the news: critically endangered. According to the field: abundant. Thriving. Found in every town I visited. Feeding other people's cranes.